Boy, that came out wrong. I mean, yeah, I’m an IT guy and a programmer. You don’t see any Tom Cruise movies about programming, y’know. Pretty unlikely that boredom will become the new hotness anytime soon. Maybe this is why marketing doesn’t ask me for slogans anymore. But I’m telling you, it is a good problem to have, and it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Not in IT at least. Bear with me for a moment.
Background: from 2008-2012 I worked for a place (the name doesn’t matter). When I hired-in, their IT systems were not doing good. Their help-desk staff was living-on-the-edge. At any moment, a server might go-down, or folks would get random error messages or help desk would report stuff like, “I’ve got a customer on the phone who says we billed them wrong”, or “we provided the wrong service”, or “folks didn’t show up when expected”. Yeah. It was hectic.
Then I came along. I don’t like that kind of excitement. When a server goes down, it makes me upset. I feel responsible somehow. So I started monitoring the servers right away. The servers were running out of memory or HDD or having run-away processes which consumed all of the processing power. I put an end to that.
It wasn’t enough. Sometimes folks would use our programs and they saw weird errors, or stuff quit working or froze-up. I wasn’t sure what was causing it (beyond general “bugginess”). So I put error logging and tracing into all of those apps.
It wound up collecting a lot of information. So I made a program to consolidate all of those logs and I made filters to identify the worst bugs. This made it really easy to find the parts of the programs (sometimes even the line of code) causing the problem(s). Programs can be fixed pretty quickly if you have information like this.
I fixed the errors which were happening most-frequently. Then I went after the ones happening less-frequently, then the rest (you get the idea). Eventually, we reached the day when no errors came-in. Dang. That day was boring.
It seemed like I had run out of stuff to do. Nobody was stopping by my office anymore, or emailing or calling. My boss even seemed distracted by other stuff. No attention. No emotion. Pretty quiet.
The boredom didn’t last forever. Soon, somebody came up with ideas about how to make the programs better, and other ideas about new programs. Well, here we go! This will bring back that spark!
Yes. We made changes, did new stuff and released our new stuff. Pretty quickly the servers crashed a few times, the logs had a few new bugs. Folks were getting emotional once again. Just like old times. Help desk had a renewed sense-of-purpose.
I couldn’t help myself. I fixed half of the bugs on the same day (the worst ones). The rest were resolved within 2 more days. Things were quiet again.
My team met and talked about how we could prevent a replay of that tragedy. We had some good ideas.
Next release was pretty boring. We deployed a bunch of updates and we saw two new small issues in the logs but nobody complained. I think we were the only ones who knew anything about it. It was pretty anti-climactic. Our PM was pretty happy, but everyone else was acting like this was status quo now, or something.
I’d like to say that things got better. But they didn’t. We started getting more work done, more quickly, without incident. It was like clockwork. Everything ran. Constant progress. So predictable.
It was awfully quiet in our department. Everyone else in the company was just doing their own jobs and paying attention to customers. Like money was the most important thing. Our programs worked so simply that people didn’t have to try to figure them out, or struggle or to think about them, really. Just like, click-click-click, get services, give money, done, good bye. Boring.
One day we even made reports that showed where we were making the most profit, analyzed top 5% vs bottom 5% and a few spots where our business was leaking money. That was exciting for a day. Then a week later, those problems got fixed too.
Anyway, sorry to end on a down-note like this. I know IT and programming can be really exciting for some folks. With frequent emergencies, support disasters, pulling all-nighters, un-solvable problems and other chaos, can feel pretty adventuresome. That is, unless you’re like me & my projects, where your end-goal is stability and peace. Then I guess we will need some hobbies outside of work or something.
I’m just saying, there are trade-offs. 😉
Aah, the pain of being an elitist 